Hello everyone,

A long time ago I was studying Japanese with the intent to go to a Japanese university. During my studies I stumbled across AJATT and this website. I loved the AJATT method and took away a lot of useful things such as SRS and Heisig's RTK.

But after meeting my now-wife, I moved to Korea and am now applying the AJATT method to learning Korean as well as using Heisig's Remembering The Traditional Hanzi (apparently Heisig himself suggested that as Korean hanja is very similar to traditional hanzi) to learn Korean hanja.

What I'm missing though are all the awesome communities that jumped up around AJATT, Heisig, and SRSing. So I was wondering if anyone had found any communities similar to this website but focused on Korean. I've found a few big communities for Chinese and of course there are many Japanese communities. But all the forums I've found for Korean are either extremely small and for other methods, or all just full of people asking really specific grammar questions, rather than discussing method, progress, etc.

So I'm wondering if anyone has found anything similar for Korean? I like to read through Koohii, but would feel out of place posting anything about Korean in Japanese-specific boards. :p

Thanks guys!

I've tried to find one for Korean myself, but haven't had any luck so far. There's the subreddit for learning korean (r/korean) but it's still very different from here. I'll be keeping an eye on this thread myself in case there's an active, big community (I doubt it though).

Lucky bastard. You don't even have to learn Hanja! You get to use a writing system that makes sense! Lucky bastard...

rainmaninjapan Wrote:Lucky bastard. You don't even have to learn Hanja! You get to use a writing system that makes sense! Lucky bastard...

Oh, cut Kanji some slack! XD I will say that Hangul is pretty awesome, though. Even more so for the fact that it's design reflects pronunciation.

That being said, when you go down the Kanji rabbit-hole far enough, I feel like they help out more than they could ever possibly hinder. The great thing about Kanji is that, even if you don't know the correct pronunciation, they communicate pure meaning so that certain words like 着地 just scream out their meaning at you even if you've never seen them before.

I definitely second Raulsen-san here. I often find myself feeling grateful that I am not having to memorize vocabulary without the aid of kanji.

Kanji is a big job and a hurdle at first (and I didn't RTK so I am not finished with them yet), but vocabulary is much, much bigger.

Especially when you don't have the advantage of a common fundamental etymological pool (as you do in West European languages) vocabulary is really probably the largest single task in learning a language. A sixteen year-old child is reckoned to have learned an average of six words a day for her whole life. That is a huge gap to make up in a much shorter time when you aren't using the language all day every day.

Compared to this, learning kanji is decidedly the lesser task (though considerable), but it makes the greater task so much easier. I dedicated the second half of a recent piece on "how difficult is Japanese?" to this question, based on experience in Japan. Because I think it is the kanji that get Japanese the reputation of being an extremely difficult language, but I really think that beyond a certain point they have the opposite effect and make it much easier.

Reviewing the Hangul?
Make it happen.

I've already done RTK 1 so it wasn't that painful, and of course Japanese would be ridiculous without them. My understanding of Korean though is that its large amount of additional sounds remove the need for disambiguation that hanja provide. I thought they barely use them now, so you'd just need to learn what 女 on a bathroom stall means or something, right?

Haha it was certainly amusing to be able to read the date of this Korean War pamphlet from wikipedia's page on hanja:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja#/med...t_2508.png

But yeah I would say that Korean is way easier to learn than Japanese nowadays... the problem is that it is hard to justify learning it, harder than justify Japanese really. Well at least for me, I guess having a Korean wife is a hell of an incentive

I thought koreans didn't saw "inter racial" relationships in a good light, guess I was wrong.

ikore Wrote:I've tried to find one for Korean myself, but haven't had any luck so far. There's the subreddit for learning korean (r/korean) but it's still very different from here. I'll be keeping an eye on this thread myself in case there's an active, big community (I doubt it though).

That's kind of disappointing to hear. I think Korean isn't as popular of a language to learn. So it's harder to find communities for it. Korea itself wasn't very well-known until very recently, Japan is a larger country with more speakers, and Japan has huge culture exports (Anime, Manga, etc.) compared to Korea.

I did find r/korean but like you said, it's very different. From the couple times I've looked there, it seems to just be people asking for help with very specific grammar points. Not too much real discussion.

rainmaninjapan Wrote:Lucky bastard. You don't even have to learn Hanja! You get to use a writing system that makes sense! Lucky bastard...

Hangul definitely is awesome, and I love it! hangul was designed really well and is fun to use. I don't know enough about Japanese to know how much sense it does or doesn't make. I am however baffled at how you can have 3 different writing systems working harmoniously in a single sentence. Seeing kanji, hiragana, and katakana all mixed together makes me wonder how to know when to use which. haha

That being said, I think hanja/kanji/hanzi look really awesome and I like that each character has it's own meaning. I was recently reading the family registry with my wife and in-laws which is all done in hanja with hangul subtitle-like writing next to it. Sort of like furigana, I guess? haha That sparked my interest in the Chinese-based characters again. So I'm starting to learn hanja, although at a much slower pace as I want to focus on my vocab/sentences.

rainmaninjapan Wrote:I've already done RTK 1 so it wasn't that painful, and of course Japanese would be ridiculous without them. My understanding of Korean though is that its large amount of additional sounds remove the need for disambiguation that hanja provide. I thought they barely use them now, so you'd just need to learn what 女 on a bathroom stall means or something, right?

I'm honestly not entirely sure how much it's really needed. Most Koreans don't know more than a few hanja I believe. My wife said most Koreans don't know them at all, although she lived in Japan for awhile and can speak fluently and by extension knows kanji. Kanji and hanja are similar enough that she can read hanja. :p

When I researched about it more myself I found it seems there are a large number of people who highly advocate learning hanja. Apparently, hanja is often used in newspapers and other literature to help differentiate homophones. People also said it really helps when learning vocabulary, which I can also see because looking stuff up in dictionaries often shows the hanja beside the hangul.

Arino Wrote:Haha it was certainly amusing to be able to read the date of this Korean War pamphlet from wikipedia's page on hanja:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja#/me … t_2508.png

But yeah I would say that Korean is way easier to learn than Japanese nowadays... the problem is that it is hard to justify learning it, harder than justify Japanese really. Well at least for me, I guess having a Korean wife is a hell of an incentive tongue

I thought koreans didn't saw "inter racial" relationships in a good light, guess I was wrong.

Korean was definitely easier to start since hangul was so easy to learn. When I was learning Japanese, I started with kanji which made it feel like I was learning Japanese forever, without actually learning Japanese. haha A couple weeks on hangul and I was able to jump into vocab/sentences really made it feel like more progress.

But you're right about justifying it, I guess. I guess it comes down to your personal goals. There are quite a few people here who are completely in love with Korean culture, especially dramas and k-pop. If I didn't meet my wife, I'd be posting here about Japanese instead of Korean! haha

Korea is getting much better, but there's still a lot of negativity with inter-racial relationships. Her family fully accepted me and now we're just working on my Korean to break down communication barriers. But we often get stares in public and see/hear people whispering about us. But other than that we haven't had much trouble.

http://pinyin.info/news/2007/korean-univ...haracters/

It's funny that 漢字 makes it easier to infer the meaning of new words when reading, but makes it possible to not understand a word you've heard a million times because there's practically no phonetic information (at least compared to the graphical information when written).

Wovaki Wrote:I am however baffled at how you can have 3 different writing systems working harmoniously in a single sentence.

People always say that Japanese has 3 different writing systems, or sometimes "2 alphabets plus kanji".

But actually Japanese only has "2 alphabets" (syllabaries) in the same sense that English (Romaji) has 2 alphabets.

When you see A and a or B and b, you think you are seeing the same letter, but that is only because you are so used to reading them. In fact many uppercase letters are a completely different shape from their lowercase equivalents, while some pairs resemble each other closely. The same is true of hiragana and katakana. They are two ways of representing the same set of sounds. The conventions for using them are different and admittedly there are less similar pairs, but essentially it is pretty much the same deal as learning upper and lowercase Romaji.


@tetsueda: Of course you are right and that can be a big pain. On the other hand there are more clues to the sound of a word than some people realize. None of them are anything like as reliable and straightforward as a sound-based writing system of course, but I find them far more helpful than might be expected.

However for taking the brutality out of sheer brute vocabulary learning, I think kanji really has the edge. In fact I think a kanji+alphabetic system like Japanese really combines the best of both worlds, even though no system is perfect.

Wovaki Wrote:I am however baffled at how you can have 3 different writing systems working harmoniously in a single sentence.

(Putting on software engineer hat.) There are four: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and roumaji (Latin alphabet). Get it right. ?

If you count hiragana and katakana as two it seems illogical to count uppercase and lowercase Romaji as one, so maybe it should be 5 （⌒▽⌒）

CureDolly Wrote:People always say that Japanese has 3 different writing systems, or sometimes "2 alphabets plus kanji".

But actually Japanese only has "2 alphabets" (syllabaries) in the same sense that English (Romaji) has 2 alphabets.

When you see A and a or B and b, you think you are seeing the same letter, but that is only because you are so used to reading them. In fact many uppercase letters are a completely different shape from their lowercase equivalents, while some pairs resemble each other closely. The same is true of hiragana and katakana. They are two ways of representing the same set of sounds. The conventions for using them are different and admittedly there are less similar pairs, but essentially it is pretty much the same deal as learning upper and lowercase Romaji.

I see what you're saying and it probably helps to think of it that way. :p Perhaps it's just my outsider's point of view, but hiragana and katakana look different enough to be considered separate alphabets/syllabaries. Regardless I don't think it would take long to learn hiragana and katakana anyway. It just looks confusing looking at a Japanese sentence that contains both of them. Although, at the same time interesting! I'm hoping to jump back into Japanese after I get to a good level of Korean.

aldebrn Wrote:(Putting on software engineer hat.) There are four: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and roumaji (Latin alphabet). Get it right.

That's true! I forgot about that. Although, I'm curious how often romaji is used in Japan? :p

aldebrn Wrote:

Wovaki Wrote:I am however baffled at how you can have 3 different writing systems working harmoniously in a single sentence.

(Putting on software engineer hat.) There are four: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and roumaji (Latin alphabet). Get it right. ?

Or just one: simplifications of ancient pictographs.

aldebrn Wrote:

Wovaki Wrote:I am however baffled at how you can have 3 different writing systems working harmoniously in a single sentence.

(Putting on software engineer hat.) There are four: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and roumaji (Latin alphabet). Get it right. ?

The fact that the book on computer processing of CJKV is 912 pages is sad... you'd think that just using unicode would fix that.

stephenmac7 Wrote:The fact that the book on computer processing of CJKV is 912 pages is sad... you'd think that just using unicode would fix that.

Haha, the book's author, Ken Lunde, is a major player in the Unicode consortium and, if I may put words in his mouth only after Twittering with him a couple of times, he'd probably get a good laugh out of that too

Unicode was designed by a committee of experts. This sentence can be read as, "Unicode was designed by a bunch of cats in a sack." But I'm slowly becoming aware of how big the task they face is. Life, and especially the writing systems we use to live life, are just that complicated. The book, which is actually pretty good, talks a lot about the pre-Unicode encodings (e.g., S-JIS, EUC-JP) for all four CJKV languages in all their national variants (China vs Taiwan vs Singapore vs Hong Kong, etc.), as well as transliteration and input methods, fonts, typefaces, dictionaries (he talks a bit about MeCab and alternatives). It won my heart because near the beginning the author casually says, "If you don't know these languages [Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese], you should learn them."

Also: "Even if these [Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese] scripts weren’t part of daily life for a quarter of humanity, there would be good reasons to study them. Compared to the Latin alphabet, they are wonderfully complex and polymorphous. That human speech can be recorded and transmitted in all these different ways tells us something about language, something about the mind, and something about how many different ways there are to be a human being."

Edit: op, sorry for getting so off-topic. I do love Korean so I am curious for an answer.

I'm hoping for a reply too. But right now it's looking pretty bleak.

Aside from forums, anyone found any good blogs about people learning Korean? I haven't found any interesting blogs I'd like to read or subscribe to. haha

(2015-10-14, 10:35 pm)Wovaki Wrote: I'm hoping for a reply too. But right now it's looking pretty bleak.

Aside from forums, anyone found any good blogs about people learning Korean? I haven't found any interesting blogs I'd like to read or subscribe to. haha

Best Korean Language Resources Online
Here I am listing the best websites to Learn Korean Online:-
http://www.topikguide.com/best-korean-la...es-online/

The following blogs are no longer updated but there are lots of good stuff and links.

http://howkoreansdoit.blogspot.jp/

http://koreanselfstudyisntlame.blogspot.jp/


Hope this helps.

(2015-11-20, 10:26 am)eslang Wrote: Best Korean Language Resources Online
Here I am listing the best websites to Learn Korean Online:-
http://www.topikguide.com/best-korean-la...es-online/

The following blogs are no longer updated but there are lots of good stuff and links.

http://howkoreansdoit.blogspot.jp/

http://koreanselfstudyisntlame.blogspot.jp/


Hope this helps.

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll be sure to take a look at them soon!

(2015-11-26, 2:17 am)Wovaki Wrote: Thanks for the suggestions! I'll be sure to take a look at them soon!

How do you say "you're welcome" in Korean?
https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-say-you...-in-Korean